Saturday, December 17, 2011

New Plague Marine Template: OOP Squad

Having read a bunch of new tutorials and having received my new brushes, I decided to take a crack at painting my favourite plague marines. That would be my OOP squad. In particular, I wanted to get started on the special weapons because I did such a bland job on them the last time.

The base coat was a very thin coat (diluted more than 50%) of chaos black, a very thin coat of graveyard earth, and a very thin coat of snakebite leather. That gave me a base of shadows so that I could see all the details.

Then, I used the zenithal light tutorial to decide where to place my shadows. In effect, you just position the light around the figurine in the way you want it to appear. So you can have top lighting, or side lighting, whatever you prefer.

I mixed enchanted blue and chaos black (again diluted more than 50%) to begin bringing out all the darkest shadows. That would be in the deepest nooks and crannies. Then I used a mix of shadow grey, chaos black, and blood red (again diluted more than 50%) to bring out the lighter shadows.

Now it was time to start blending a little more, so I used very diluted bubonic brown to brighten the lighter sections of the figurine, taking care to leave some of the original basecoat to the edges of the lightening effect.

Now it was time to do the strong highlights. For this I used rotting flesh (very diluted), being careful all the time to not make it too thick. This went on every part I wanted to jump out. The sections painted in rotting flesh would not pop on their own since the coat was very light. Instead, I used very thin traces of bleach bone to highlight all the lines.

This method is different from my past efforts because I never tried painting blends before such as the three colour shadows. I also usually just dry brushed like crazy to bring out detail before, and the result was a bit bland. Now all the detail is crisp and easy to see with the naked eye. This is the biggest improvement, and it was made possible by my discovery of Kolinsky Tajmyr Brushes. I abused mine mercilessly, even using it for drybrushing (albeit very delicately but still), and even so, it still holds a beautiful point. I've used it now to paint three different models and it is still excellent for fine detail work. My old brushes would die after one figurine.

The figure took me 6 hours to complete, so it is feasible that I could paint my entire army over the course of 2-3 months. We'll see how I feel after I complete at least a seven man squad.

Update

I have now finished 3. The template isn't set in stone since every figure I try it on seems to come out a little different.

These old plague marine models are so much nicer than the new ones or even the ones from Forgeworld. If only GW had done more. Now they cost a fortune on Ebay unless you are very lucky. Another dude from what I think is 2nd edition but I could be mistaken. I love this model: